Our reviews and thoughts on the latest releases, classics, and nostalgic favourites. Things we loved, things we hated, and worst of all, things we were ambivalent about.
In 1968, there were dreamers, and Giorgio Rosa wasn’t the only one, but he’s the man we’re going follow today, all the way to Rose Island.
Actually, in 1968 there was no Rose Island as Giorgio (Elio Germano) hadn’t built it yet. But he’s about to. He’s an engineer, a creator, and a thinker. And one day he gets to thinking: wouldn’t it be nice to build an island out in international waters? All to his own?
Rose Island tells the “incredible true story!” of how Rosa solved the problem of how to build an island, but more importantly, how it captured people’s imaginations, drew crowds, and was eventually declared its own nation. Built off Italy’s Rimini coast, it looked a lot like a party barge but also embodied ideals of independence, anarchy, challenging the status quo, and living life off grid, and without rules. Rosa and his acolytes believed their island could change the world, and the first step was establishing it as its own sovereign nation. Of course, that’s also what attracts the attention of the Italian government, who declares Rosa and his island an enemy. Founding your own island nation is fun and games until someone aims their cannons at you.
Rose Island is a fun movie for dreamers and disruptors but the truth is, not a lot actually happens. Between construction and war, there’s just a lot of sitting around and drinking sangria, with the occasional cut to Italian government officials wondering what they should do, who they should tell, pushing around bits of paper, and probably wishing they could jet out to the island themselves for some anonymous debauchery.
I admit that the story definitely deserves to be told and there’s definitely a vitality to rebellion and revolution. I didn’t love the movie, its on-again, off-again momentum was a bit frustrating, but I was glad to hear this little bit of history that I’d never known before.
You may or may not be a fan of Hallmark movies and that’s absolutely okay either way. I’ve come to think of them as comfort food in movie form – warm and predictable in a way that makes you feel happy and safe. Not to mention the guaranteed happy ending: when life is hectic and challenging, it can be nice to know that the characters you’re investing in are definitely going to wind up happily ever after.
However, fan of the genre or not, one Hallmark movie was always going to have the distinction of Worst Hallmark Movie, and I humbly nominate Lucky Christmas.
Holly (Elizabeth Berkley) is a single mom who pays for rent in cooking because she never has the cash (thank goodness for obliging grandparent-types). She works three jobs so I’m not sure where that money’s going, but let’s concentrate on the sympathetic figure she cuts and not think too deeply on details – there are bigger problems ahead.
Holly’s about to have good luck and bad luck. Bad luck: someone steals her car clunker from the bar one night. Good luck: those obliging, grandparenty landlords of hers have an unused vintage Camaro she can drive instead. Good luck: she wins the Christmas lottery, worth a million dollars. Bad luck: the winning ticket was in her car. The stolen one.
Across town are two idiot criminal buddies who call to mind Marv and Harry of the Wet Bandits. Mike (Jason Gray-Stanford) and Joe (Mike Bell) are bumbling fools who’ve accidentally set fire to an entire job site, and then accidentally stolen a car and then deliberately held ransom a lottery ticket for a piece of the pie since they know they can’t cash it themselves. If you’re wondering at this point, like I was, when Holly’s going to get her love interest in this damn holiday romance, the bad news is: she already has, and you missed it. You assumed, because of the many, many Hallmark movies like it, that Holly would get a decent guy. Instead, she’s getting Mike, one of the criminals. I resisted this insinuation for so long that I had mentally prepared for Holly to live happily alone forever after, but no, Mike was pretending to like Holly in order to suggest she post a reward (a large percentage of the winnings) for the return of the ticket, but then she unwisely lets him get close to her kid, and she’s apparently got such low self-esteem that a dirty rotten scoundrel is as good as she thinks she can get.
Now I know that Elizabeth Berkley fell pretty far between her stint as Jessie Spano on Saved By The Bell to her turn as Nomi in Showgirls, but this? This is cruel. This is too much.
[Sidebar: am I the only one who watched the recent Saved By The Bell Reboot, for which Jessie Spano returns as a guidance counsellor and AC Slater as the coach? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but…it’s actually pretty good.]
Mike is a loser, and Holly deserves a better fate, for this one can never deliver the happy ending this movie promises. She deserves to discover that not only is she more than enough on her own, it’s actually much preferable to be alone than to be with a partner who will only drag you down. I know Hallmark defines ‘happily ever after’ as coupled, but there’s more to life than romantic love. And what’s romantic about a relationship that starts out as a lie anyway? I realize that watching a Hallmark Christmas movie means just buying into the fantasy and not asking questions, but this, to me, was more of a nightmare.
Lucie (Sabrina Ouazani) is on a very weird path. First, she’s in a coma. Well, first she’s in an accident, then she’s in a coma, and then she wakes up, pretty much completely fine, other than a memory (vision?) of a mysterious man by her bedside. Could it be her long lost father? Lucie’s mom insists no, but Lucie’s gut is saying yes, so she combines her need to get right back into training for an upcoming dance competition with a desperate search for a father she’s never known.
It leads her to Max’s bar/seedy motel, Max (Hassam Ghancy) being the prime suspect. Turns out Max is a reformed criminal who helps newly released prisoners get back on their feet. Which explains what makes barkeep Vincent (Kevin Mischel) such an irresistible bad boy – that ankle bracelet really does something for the ladies. Also, in an incredible coincidence, Vincent is a dancer who “doesn’t dance anymore” yet is continually caught dancing. Or what the French call dancing, which actually seems a little painful and spastic. A dark secret (besides the one that landed him in jail) is hinted at.
But Lucie already has a partner! A dance partner/boyfriend, one who is quickly losing patience with her quest to find herself through “dancing” with dangerous, handsome men.
Sabrina Ouazani is quite compelling to watch, and the film stumbles upon an occasional spark or two, but mostly it’s uncomfortably corny and left me rolling my eyes way more often than must be good for my health.
Director Marc Fouchard struggles to establish any tension between Lucie and her maybe-daddy, and fails to find chemistry between his two leads, which makes for a pretty lackluster movie that really didn’t hold my interest.
Safety plays it pretty safe as far as inspirational sports movies go. Following in the footsteps of Remember The Titans or The Blindside, Safety tells the true story of a freshman college football player who’s got a lot more on his plate than just practice.
Ray (Jay Reeves) is just like any other athlete at Clemson University, until things back home start to fall apart. His mother is an addict, and little brother Fahmarr (Thaddeus J. Mixson) has been alone since her most recent arrest. And things are about to get worse: the good news is, Ray’s mom is going on to a rehab facility to get help. Bad news? That leaves Fahmarr alone, and he’s just a kid. There’s no one else to take him, so it’s either a group home, or…. Or Ray decides to sneak him unto campus where he secretly cares for him for the next month or so, just barely managing between class, football, and childcare, plus the burden of a pretty big secret.
Remember that Ray McElrathbey was a real kid who took on the raising of his younger brother while attending school on a full sports scholarship. He couldn’t really afford to risk his full ride by becoming distracted, nor could he afford to risk his brother’s life. For a while he manages both, but eventually his school and those darn NCAA folks who are sticklers for rules.
Safety skirts around its darker corners, focusing instead on the importance of family and community; if you were feeling cynical you might call it sanitized, but if you were feeling generous of heart you might just find it admirable for its sense of duty, sacrifice, support, and good old fashioned taking care of each other. It’s formulaic and completely unsurprising but it’s also the kind of heart warming stuff that’s hard to resist, especially around the holidays. Director Reginald Hudlin knows he’s got a good story, and tells it in a low-frills, straight forward kind of way, and if it’s a little saccharine, well, we could all use a little extra sweetness this year, couldn’t we?
Travis’s ranch, like many others in Montana, has just barely survived the drought, and now he’s looking to refinance to keep it afloat. In order to secure a second loan, Travis (Colin Ferguson) will have to prove that he can pay it back, which typically means either cutting back on expenses or finding other revenue streams. Travis can’t squeeze any more revenue out of the ranch, but he’s not willing to cut any of his employees either. Enter Sara (Kellie Martin), the businesswoman who’s going to make it happen.
She’s not entirely thrilled to be sent to Montana so close to Christmas, and as a widow and single parent, she’ll have to drag her teenage daughter Chloe along with her, who isn’t even sure there’s wifi in Montana. Actually it turns out to be a much more pleasant experience than either mother or daughter anticipated. Chloe looks up from her screen periodically, long enough to notice that this is the nicest Christmas she and her mother have shared since her dad died. She doesn’t really want to go home.
Sara, however, is a little more ambivalent. She’s falling for Travis, but it’s clear that his ranch is really important to him and he could never leave it. But her career, and her ability to support her daughter and their life in L.A., has to come first. As the sole provider, she can’t take risks. Sadly but responsibly, they agree they can’t be together.
Show of hands: who thinks Sara will find a way to save the ranch? Who thinks Chloe’s constant selfies will somehow play a part? Who thinks Kay’s famous eggnog has rum in it? Can a city girl learn to gather eggs from chickens? Does anyone look good in a Christmas tree hat? Do all cowboys wear bolo ties? Hallmark has all the answers your little heart desires – and more besides, I’ll bet. Prepare to be charmed by Cowboy Colin.
Meg (Alicia Witt) loves giving voice and piano lessons out of the music store her family has run for generations. When she meets Nate (Andrew Walker), who’s just returned to Denver after years away, he’s surprised to learn that their store still exists. It’s one of many locally owned, mom and pop stores still somehow standing on Christmas Tree Lane in the city’s historic downtown. They’ve managed to withstand the pressure from suburbs and malls and online shopping, but the whole block has just received a collective eviction notice; all of these old buildings will be demolished to make room for new office buildings, and these guys have to be out by the end of the year.
Meg, of course, is determined to save Christmas Tree Lane, and organizes a vintage Christmas extravaganza – a tree decorating competition, a Santa photo booth, and of course, considering her proclivities, a Christmas concert to rally the whole community. Nate, who thinks she’s cute, is her new best customer, and now he’s also her best soldier in her little Christmas army. At least until they discover that Nate works for the evil development firm (run by his own father of course) that’s planning on tearing down Christmas Tree Lane. Boo!!
So what do you think? Will Nate develop sugar diabetes from his cocoa habit? Will Meg ever get to wear that slinky vintage dress? Will a concert possibly stop a wrecking ball? You can only find out by watching, so hurry on over to Hallmark.
Director Graham Kolbeins’s Queer Japan has a big, open heart. The documentary examines the multi-faceted queer community in Japan with a generous cross-section of its members. Tomato Hatakeno is a transgender activist and video game guide book author; Gengoroh Tagame is a gay erotic artist known internationally for his hardcore BDSM-themed manga; Vivienne Sato is a famed artist and drag queen. But despite the film’s depth of trailblazing artists and activists, it punches most heavily when it’s sitting with everyday people, people who are making compromises and taking risks just to live some part of their truth. One young person, a misfit, a gender outlaw, commented at a pride parade “I don’t give a shit about love, I need toilets” – a brutally honest reminder of a hierarchy of needs and rights that are not addressed equally within the community (or, I suppose, without).
Curating from over a hundred interviews conducted over 3 years in various locations across Japan, Kolbein has more than enough colour to paint a rainbow. We get a back stage pass to the glossy parties and the seedy underground, meeting people living boldly in all walks of life. It’s truly a prismatic view of Japan’s deliciously diverse queer culture, and a glossary of terms is helpfully provided so we enjoy as immersive an experience as possible.
Queer Japan is a celebration of non-conformity, of alternative thinking, of living life without apology. But this party is also well-informed by that same community’s hardships, struggles, and minority status. While much of it is still lived in the margins, the documentary’s hopeful, irrepressible tone makes it clear that change is coming, and this vibrant, resilient community is not just ready for it. They’re making it happen.
Queer Japan is available in virtual cinemas and on demand December 11.
The Prom is a new movie on Netflix based on a Broadway musical of the same name about a handful of Broadway stars looking to clean up their image by taking on a random cause. The cause in question is a prom in Indiana that the PTA would rather cancel than allow a gay student to attend with her girlfriend. It’s a pretty gay musical that Ryan Murphy manages to make bigger, better, and gayer than ever, with boatloads of sequins and buckets of wigs, and the shiniest, sparkliest cast he could assemble.
Dee Dee (Meryl Streep) is a veteran stage actress, a Broadway phenom with a Tony in her purse and an outsized sense of entitlement. When we meet her, she’s starring in the opening night of Eleanor, a musical about Eleanor Roosevelt. Co-starring as FDR is Barry (James Corden), a Broadway mainstay who’s still chasing that first Tony, and hoping this might be it. Unfortunately, a bad review pretty much shuts them down on that first night, and someone has the temerity to point out that it’s not so much that the show is bad as that the two of them are so disliked. They’re narcissists, they’re told, though they’re not convinced that’s such a bad thing. But in the best interest of their careers, they decide to rehab their reputations by support a cause (a cause celebre, they specify) along with Broadway actor “between gigs” Trent (Andrew Rannells) and inveterate chorus girl Angie (Nicole Kidman), who ride the next bus out of town toward homophobic Indiana.
Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman) is the sweet teenage girl who just wants to take her girlfriend to prom. Alyssa (Ariana DeBose) is her closeted girlfriend and the daughter of Mrs. Greene (Kerry Washington), the “homosexual prom’s” #1 opponent. Principal Tom (Keegan-Michael Key) does what he can to mitigate the damage but he’s pretty powerless with so much opposition. Plus, now he’s start struck on top of everything else – he’s Dee Dee’s biggest fan.
As our Broadway do-gooders get to know Emma and her situation, what started out as a charitable act of self-interest turns into something a little more genuine, although the unironic, attention-hogging performance of It’s Not About Me had its charms. Both the songs and the film are uneven, but they’re also so much fun, who cares? I didn’t particularly buy Nicole Kidman as a mere chorus girl either, but do you hear me complaining? No. Because singing and dancing have put so much joy in my heart I should feel ashamed to ask for anything more.
The Prom is not a great movie, but it is boisterous, glittery good fun, full of beautiful costumes, beautiful voices, and a totally stacked cast. Ryan Murphy doesn’t do subtle, but he does have an eye for a fantastic musical number and this movie has north of a dozen. Though the feeling may be flitting, you can’t help but feel good while watching it, and what a perfect way to spend an evening near the holidays. The Prom is pure indulgence – tacky, campy, cheesy, and unforgivably feel-good. So feel it.
Kendra Adams (Nazneen Contractor) went to school for journalism but wound up writing listicles and personality quizzes at a Buzzfeed knock-off. She’s pretty good at getting readers wondering what kind of reindeer they are, but she’d like to do a little more so she keeps pitching her boss meatier pieces, which her boss summarily rejects.
One day, while browsing an antique store’s jewelry counter for her own mother’s lost engagement ring, she finds a similar one with a unique inscription, “My Christmas Love 1948.” The romance and mystery intrigue our intrepid reporter Kendra, whose subsequent pitch is again rejected but she decides to pursue the story anyway, on her own time. In New England she’s able to trace the ring back to the owner’s grandson, Michael (David Alpay), who was raised by his grandparents but has no memory of the ring. Together they discover the legacy his grandparents left behind, and the sacrifices they both made for what was most important – love.
Will it lead to a story? Or will it lead to something even more important: Kendra’s own romance? Watch and find out – the answer may surprise you!
I was in the right kind of mood to fall in love with a movie, and Mank was it for me.
Sean and I were at the cottage last weekend celebrating his birthday, and it was the first 48 hours I’d spent movie-free all year. Which is weird, considering 2020 will be known, among so many other things, as the year without movies. And yet, if you’re devoted to movie views and reviews, there were actually plenty of films to watch (this is my 428th review this year, not including some of Halloween and Christmas content that I backdate). Still, a lot (most) of the big releases have been delayed and there were perhaps fewer films to really get excited about – most markedly at this time of year, as Christmas is usually the big awards kick-off. So I was ripe to be swept away, ripe to appreciate something big and intentional, thoughtful and well-crafted. Mank was a cinematic gift under my tree this year, and the tag reads ‘With Love from David Fincher.’
Herman J. Mankiewicz (“call me Mank”), having just survived a car crash, is laid up in bed with a broken leg. Recovering in seclusion, and bedridden due to injury, he is perhaps in a wonderful position to do some serious writing, or that’s what Orson Welles is hoping. Orson Welles is a hot shot young director who’s just been given the Hollywood golden ticket, a rare opportunity to have complete creative control over his films. Welles has selected notorious drunk Mankiewicz as his screenwriter, leaving him with a stack of pristine white pages, a nurse, and a typist to get the work done in just a few weeks. What Mank eventually turns in will be a whirlwind, and long-winded, but beautifully written script for what will turn out to be the greatest film ever made: Citizen Kane. David Fincher’s movie takes a closer look at the duress under which that screenplay came to be written, and the Hollywood experiences that inspired it.
1930s Hollywood had a lot of stuff going on: a great depression, a looming war, rising anti-Semitism, the demonization of socialism…it was the Golden Age of Hollywood, but if you rubbed at the gold plating just a little, you could easily expose an awful lot of ugliness. Mank was a skeptic and a scathing social critic. Before he wrote for movies, he wrote for newspapers; he was the Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Tribune but really sharpened his wit as the drama critic for The New York Times and as the first regular drama critic at The New Yorker. When he made the move to Hollywood, Mank was often asked to fix the screenplays of other writers, with much of this work going uncredited. Ultimately he worked on The Wizard of Oz, Man of the World, Dinner at Eight, Pride of the Yankees, and The Pride of St. Louis, and dozens more. He became one of the highest-paid writers in the world, audiences gobbling up his new style of “fast” and “immoral” characters and plot. He wasn’t the most important man in Hollywood but he knew the ones that were – studio head Louis B. Mayer, for example, of whom Mank was not a fan.
David Fincher’s film sees Mank (Gary Oldman) laid up in bed, reflecting on his time in Hollywood, and digesting it into a movie that Welles (Tom Burke) would immortalize, critics would applaud, history would remember, and Hollywood insiders revile, for they knew the man Mank was referencing behind a veil so thin it left very little doubt. The man was of course frenemy and newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance).
As typist Rita (Lily Collins) races to keep pace, turning his volumes of scrawls into something legible, Mank writes feverishly and drinks furiously. He has clearly been holding on to a lot of resentment as we flashback to specific events that are easily related to characters and scenes that we know and love from Citizen Kane. Hearst’s mistress, for example, Marion Davies (Amandy Seyfried), an actress for whom Hearst co-founded a movie studio, and to whose career he devoted many headlines throughout his vast media empire. And Mayer (Arliss Howard) at the studio, shamelessly churning out propaganda that would be mistaken for news (fake news, we’d call it in 2020) in order to sway elections. Mank has contempt for them all, and yet he’s able to turn into a script about spiritual corruption into, well, an enjoyable movie about spiritual corruption. It’s beautiful, in its way, in its insight and compassion.
Fincher’s film attracts my attention, my whimsy, and my admiration from the very first frame – from the opening credits, even. It looks and feels like a movie made during the period in which it’s set, and yet it also looks and feels as though it has every benefit that modern 21st century film making has to offer. With the help of cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, Fincher straddles a line of his own making, and manages to lay down on film the very best of both worlds. Mank is textured and technically brilliant. It is a love letter to cinema, to the greatest movie ever made, and to film making itself, by brilliant film maker himself, an auteur, a highly skilled visual storyteller who eschewed film school and cut his teeth instead on Rick Springfield music videos (true story). After making his way through the very best (Madonna, Aerosmith, Iggy Pop, George Michael, Michael Jackson, the Stones), he made the leap to the big screen with 1992’s Alien³ (which also starred Charles Dance, fyi), which wasn’t a critical darling but did take some admirable risks with the franchise’s mythology. Ice broken, Fincher never looked back, and if you’re any kind of cinephile, chances are pretty good at least one of his films is in your top 10 (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, Gone Girl), yet he’s never won an Oscar for direction, nor have any of his films landed the coveted Best Picture award, though The Curious Case of Benjamin Button seemed a shoo-in with 13 nominations that year (it lost to Slumdog Millionaire). Will this be Fincher’s year?
Mank‘s cast is not to be forgotten, the film’s success in large part thanks to an extremely talented ensemble who really work the material. The razor-sharp dialogue can be a lot of fun, and some of the drunken soliloquies are absolutely the stuff Oscar clips are made of. Gary Oldman of course deserves top credit for portraying a cynic with a secret soft heart, but he’s surrounded by people able to rally, particularly Charles Dance who is most hypnotic as a titan outraged by criticism. The quasi-betrayal between these two men is a magnetic source of conflict and intrigue.
The script too, is something to behold, and it’s perhaps the component that fascinates me most, credited to a Jack Fincher. Any relation, you might ask? Indeed, Jack Fincher is David’s father. David’s dead father, in fact, dead since 2003 in fact. Mank is his only screen credit. Clearly this script has been languishing in a drawer somewhere for quite some time, perhaps its only companion a screenplay about Howard Hughes that never got made once Scorsese chose John Logan’s version for The Aviator. Still, Mank must have been the favourite, since David recalls that as a budding child cinephile shepherded mostly by his father, there was no question which was “the greatest movie ever made.” Of course, that was very much nearly fact for a very long time, the film beloved and admired from the 1950s on (especially once it started being screened on television). It has been the watermark against which all other film is measured, and has informed an entire generation of film makers. Jack Fincher’s script is a clever way to let us celebrate the film once again, and perhaps appreciate some of its most personal influences. The senior Fincher gets lone credit for the script, though the way it proficiently draws such incisive parallels to present day makes it clear that Junior has had a hand in it is well. I wouldn’t be bothered one bit to see Jack Fincher receive an Oscsar nomination for his work, and I do wonder who holds the record for (forgive me) most posthumously awarded recipient.
Mank manages a send up to an entire era of film making while also saluting the man who gave so many favoured films of the time their unique flavour and identity. It’s a peek behind the scenes that isn’t necessarily pretty, but incredibly fascinating, an homage to an undisputed classic that just may turn into a classic itself.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 